No image available
/ 13 August 2007

Move over PC, MUC is coming

Could one of the inventors of the webcam transform the economics of computing for the poor? In 1991, when he was a doctoral student at Cambridge, Quentin StaffordFraser hooked up a camera to monitor the department’s coffeepot so his fellow workers would know when it was fresh.

No image available
/ 4 May 2007

The demise of professional photographers

Half-a-dozen lurid and splodgy pictures in the local paper brought home to me the death of an honourable profession this week. I took them. I am in my small way responsible for impoverishing an old friend, because he, not me, is a professional photographer, and his living has been more or less abolished by the changing world.

No image available
/ 26 March 2007

Fat lady gets ready to sing for Opera

Two months ago I stopped using Opera — the smallest, once the fastest and often the best browser built to date. Opera had all the good ideas years before everyone else. It had tabbed browsing in 1997, and proper CSS support in the same year, long before there was any proper CSS to decode.